Lottery game tickets are frequently sold in retail establishments such as convenience stores, liquor stores, and the like. These and other establishments selling lottery tickets are sensitive to the costs of counter space used, and labor required in the sale and redemption of lottery tickets
Some lottery customers do not want to wait for a weekly or daily drawing. These customers may purchase “instant-win” lottery tickets. Such tickets may also involve games, such as lotto, battleship, bingo, or other games that increase customer interest and enjoyment in the purchase of such tickets. Instant-win lottery tickets are generally sold to retailers in pre-printed books or bundles. A pre-printed ticket may have a printed indica or message indicating the ticket is a winner and/or the prize amount, as well as human or machine-readable codes for authenticating winning tickets. These indica, messages, and codes may be hidden, e.g., with a peel-off or scratch-off coating. Commonly, whether an instant-win ticket is a winner is predetermined prior to the sale of the ticket.
One cost that retailers are particularly sensitive to is the cost of redeeming tickets. Retailers do not want to spend excessive amounts of time dealing with redemptions of tickets that are not actually winners. Also retailers want to minimize the amount of time spent authenticating tickets. At the same time lottery providers want to insure that lotteries are protected from fraud, including fraud by retailers. Accordingly, efficient and reliable approaches to ticket validation are desirable.
To allow authentication of winning instant-win tickets, conventional instant-win tickets may include a numeric code that is keyed in by a cashier when the ticket is tendered for redemption. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,317,135 to Finocchio describes a method and apparatus for validating instant-win tickets. This numeric code may be used to authenticate the ticket, e.g., as a key in a public key encryption system or as an index to a ticket database. Some other proposed lottery systems use machine readable authentication information in order to speed the process of validating a ticket. Machine readable information avoids the need to have a cashier or attendant manually key in authentication information. These proposed lottery systems have included tickets where all of the authentication information is hidden when the ticket is sold, e.g., by hiding a machine-readable code under the scratch-off coating found on a typical instant ticket. However, to improve authentication and fraud control, it may be useful to make some of the authentication information available prior to the sale of a ticket, and thus prior to the removal of the concealing scratch-off or other layer.